Corazon Aquino: Housewife led 'people power' overthrow, rose to presidency

MANILA, Philippines — Corazon Aquino, the unassuming housewife who toppled a dictator with a "people power" revolt and sustained democracy as president by fighting off seven coup attempts in six years, died today, her son said. She was 76.

The uprising she led in 1986 ended the repressive 20-year government of Ferdinand Marcos and inspired nonviolent protests across the globe, including those that ended Communist rule in Eastern Europe.

But she struggled in office to meet high public expectations. Her land-redistribution program fell short of ending economic domination by the landed elite, including her own family. Her leadership, especially in social and economic reform, was often indecisive, leaving many allies disillusioned by the end of her term.

Still, the bespectacled, smiling woman in her trademark yellow dress remained beloved in the Philippines, where she was affectionately referred to as "Tita (Auntie) Cory."

Mrs. Aquino was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer last year. Her son, Sen. Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III, said the cancer had spread to other organs and she was too weak to continue chemotherapy.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who is on an official visit to the United States, said "the entire nation is mourning" Mrs. Aquino's demise. Arroyo declared a period of national mourning and announced a state funeral would be held for the former president.

Mrs. Aquino's unlikely rise began in 1983, when her husband, opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr., was assassinated on the tarmac of Manila's international airport as he returned from exile in the United States to challenge Marcos, his longtime adversary.

The killing enraged many Filipinos and unleashed a broad-based opposition movement that thrust Mrs. Aquino into the role of national leader.

"I don't know anything about the presidency," she said in 1985, a year before she agreed to run against Marcos.

In what she called her greatest achievement, Mrs. Aquino presided over free elections, appointed an independent judiciary, encouraged a free press and restored other democratic institutions gutted by Marcos during his 20-year authoritarian rule.

She also fought to retain two of America's largest overseas military bases, Subic Bay and Clark Field, in the face of nationalist senators who emerged victorious in severing ties that had bound the United States to its former colony since the Spanish-American War and the dawn of the 20th century.

She left office in 1992 but remained politically active until beset by illness, joining protest rallies demanding the resignation of Arroyo for suspected vote-rigging and corruption.

Mrs. Aquino left a mixed legacy as president. Her government was beset by seven bloody coup attempts by disaffected right-wing military officers and Marcos loyalists. Challenges from communist rebels, terrorists and armed Muslim secessionists, along with debilitating government scandals, left her administration lurching from crisis to crisis and, it seemed, constantly on the edge of collapse.

She appeared jinxed by natural disasters that included a deadly earthquake, one of the century's worst volcanic eruptions at Mount Pinatubo, floods, typhoons and a drought. She also proved an inept and indecisive leader in her country's high-pressure and volatile political culture. Wary of wielding too much power, as Marcos had, she left agrarian reform to a newly elected Congress dominated by rich landowners, and little land changed hands in the feudalistic countryside.

Her administration had little success in alleviating the grinding poverty that affects more than half the population or in stamping out the nation's endemic cronyism, graft and corruption. A staunch Roman Catholic, she gutted birth-control programs in one of Asia's most crowded and poorest countries.

By the end of her term, the woman who was named Time magazine's Woman of the Year in 1987 had lost much of the global goodwill that accompanied her accession to power.

"While it was the restoration of democracy, (people power) was not the restoration of good government," the Rev. Joaquin Bernas, a Jesuit and former adviser to Mrs. Aquino, wrote at the end of her term. "We have come to realize that it is much easier to set up the external trappings of democracy than to make it work to the satisfaction of our people."

Mrs. Aquino appeared to dislike her job and, at the end, counted the days until she left office. But she fulfilled a key promise: She survived her term and presided over the first peaceful transfer of power in the tempestuous country in more than 26 years.

"She led the restoration of democracy back to the Philippines," Fidel Ramos told the Los Angeles Times after he was elected to succeed Aquino in May 1992. "Of course, she didn't do it by herself. But she will be remembered as having led the fight against the dictatorship."

Mrs. Aquino is survived by her son and four daughters.